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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of why archeologists shouldn't be believed. They've extrapolated the universe from a piece of fairy cake here. They found : burned buildings and a pot inside another pot. There are an infinite number of explanations for those two findings.

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This is a boring, overplayed, anti-science trope. The uncertainty is even visible in the title: "Romans may have destroyed..." It's a headline to draw interest to the story about a dig. Journalists need a hook. Nobody clicks on "Archaeologists found a pot on Tuesday."

Mostly agree, but I would click the shit out of "Archaeologists found a pot on Tuesday." :)

Same here. There is something about the mundaness that piques your interest.

Calling something “anti science” is a boring overplayed trope by itself.

> This is a good example of why archeologists shouldn't be believed.

Sometimes, a spade is a spade. What I responded to isn't just a shallow dismissal of the article, it's a shallow dismissal of an entire field of study based on a malicious interpretation of an article's title. That's anti-science.

I think you’re reading journalists, not the actual archeologists.

They saw evidence and suggested a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe. Sometimes they’ll note loose threads for further study.

Scientific literature has gotten terrible about drawing conclusions from too few points and over reliance on flawed statistical analysis.

But archeology doesn’t even pretend from what I’ve seen in the past few years.

> I personally have never read an archeologist state a conclusion they didn’t directly observe.

Ritual. It's literally a running joke, and it's every. single. paper.

https://animalarchaeology.com/2018/10/09/what-is-old-is-new-...

Wengrow/Graeber speak to this at length in their recent book Dawn of Everything, from perspective of anthro/archaeology

How exactly is an archeologist ever to directly observe anything? Short of tardis tech, all they can ever do is pull logical conclusions form evidence. A worksite quickly burned and abandoned? During a time of strife with Roman armies? Valuable objects left untouched. It wasn't aliens or a dragon attack.

Archaeologists directly observe artifacts. For example, there's a class of artifact that have been called "storage jars" but there wasn't any evidence of what was "stored" in them. Some hypothesized that they were used as chamber pots, but they're too large to sit on. Recently, an archaeologist directly observed the eggs of a human fecal parasite inside of such a "storage jar," evidence in favor of the chamber pot hypothesis. They further hypothesize that these "storage jars" were housed in a wooden frame so that people could sit & do their business -- an ancient port-a-potty -- with little expectation that such a wooden structure would have survived the millenia. And, note the title "ceramic pot was probably a portable toilet."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/this-ancient-roman-c...

The criminal justice system works in the same way. Detectives look for evidence that a person was at the scene of a murder, and evidence linking the person to the murder weapon, and establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt even though no other living person directly observed the murder.

Yes but the "direct observations only" crowd, which includes various conspiracy theories, would have them only report on evidence without drawing any other statements. Some historians would have archeologists do only dig reports, leaving everything else to historians. Conspiracy nuts would have police only create evidence reports, leaving everything else to lay juries.

You're saying that Romans destroying the mental works is just one possible explanation?

So are the archaeologists.

>Archaeologists suggest one possible explanation could be that it may have been the actions of Roman soldiers following their victory over Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Grapius around AD 83.

There is a nice book about this concept, called “Motel of the Mysteries”.

The idea is that a group of archaeologists find a derelict motel in the future and try to explain what the mundane items were used for. It’s hilarious.

I read this a long time ago, too! It's great.

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